In America, We Were All “Russian,” but Soviet Jewish Identity Has Always Been Complex

For years the word “Russian” served as a catch-all for Russian-speaking emigres in the U.S. In fact, many came from countries that were decidedly not “Russia,” but places like Ukraine and Moldova and Lithuania. Many were Jews fleeing antisemitism. They spoke Russian because the aforementioned countries were a part of the Soviet empire, where edicts from Moscow meant each nation was granted little autonomy, and celebration of a unique national culture or language or really anything that wasn’t expressly Soviet was severely and sometimes forcefully restricted. It created an almost unprecedented cultural hegemony among disparate places — someone in Kyiv would be listening to the same music and watching the same films as someone in Riga. Often, if I meet a fellow Soviet emigre and we trade notes about our childhoods, it turns out we ate the same foods (with a few regional/familial tweaks), watched the same cartoons, and wore the same school clothes. Our parents tell the same jokes and have disconcertingly similar temperaments.
Our identities in the U.S. were then collectively less country-specific and more “formerly Soviet” and for many of us, decidedly Jewish (though not religious), informed by years of antisemitism, both as a personal prejudice and a state-sponsored one. (Per our internal passports, our nationality wasn’t marked as “Russian,” or “Ukrainian,” but as “Jewish.” That’s how our compatriots saw us, too.) The Soviet Union was a place our parents felt lucky to escape, but our ties to the places we left behind felt stronger or weaker depending on where we were fleeing. And those ties have only come into starker relief these last few weeks, since Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine.
My family came from Moscow, Russia, which, because it was the seat of the Soviet empire, conferred assumptions about your education level (high) and attitude (snobbish). The city (versus country) distinction felt like the most notable one, and I’d be judged differently compared to, say, someone like fellow Soviet Jew Mila Kunis, whose family is from the smaller city of Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Still, most of us had relatives across the region. Because of this Soviet flattening, my family’s background didn’t really feel specifically Russian, not in the way most people understand nationality. My great-grandparents only arrived in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution, from what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, from smaller shtetls and larger cities like Warsaw, with rich and pervasive Jewish histories. For hundreds of years prior to 1917, most Jews within the Russian empire were legally confined to the Pale of Settlement, a swath of land stretching north-south from Latvia to Ukraine, and encompassing almost the entirety of what is modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as eastern Poland and a small sliver of western Russia and southern Latvia. At the end of the 19th century, only 200,000 out of the roughly 5 million Jews within the empire lived outside the Pale. Jews were a small and often unwanted and discriminated presence in places outside these borders, including in Moscow and St. Petersburg, not that they were much wanted within the Pale either. (A much smaller number of Jews resided in millenia-long communities in Central Asia and the Caucuses; though part of the Russian Empire, these areas weren’t technically part of the Pale or subject to its specific restrictions.)
I don’t remember when I first saw the modern white, blue, and red Russian flag, officially reinstated in 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it has always felt foreign. I never lived in Russia, neither did my parents or grandparents. We lived in the U.S.S.R., and owing to why we left, that identity was permanently severed. The list of discontents was long and consisted of persistent discrimination, general hostility toward the system, the corruption, the cynicism, and the history of state-sponsored murder — my great-grandfather was executed in 1938 during Stalin’s purges; his son, my grandfather, was sent to a labor camp as a son of an enemy of the state.
We still watched the movies, ate the food, listened to the music, but it wasn’t really home — the way most refugees speak about being forced to flee their home, a place they love — because we were never really welcome. Our Russianness existed as a kind of abstract amalgamation of cultural touchstones, crystalized in our collective consciousness but decoupled from the actual place. When we left in 1989, our statelessness and international limbo wasn’t just a diplomatic distinction, it was, in fact, emblematic of our actual identities at that moment. We were a people without a home.
It’s been fascinating then, to observe certain Soviets Jews take on the national identity of their former country of residence. At a rally for Ukraine in Times Square, I spoke to an elderly Jewish emigre from Odessa, there with his two grandsons, who had draped himself in the Ukrainian flag, a scene hard to imagine 30 years ago, when many were leaving for similar reasons as my family. He looked and spoke almost exactly like my own grandfather — his posture, his cadence, all of it was so familiar. At the same rally, I looked over at someone holding an “I’m Russian, and I’m Against the War,” placard. A similar declaration of identity in my hands would have felt disingenuous. I had thought that the severing of national allegiance to our former homes was permanent, for many of us Soviet Jews. I was wrong. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen Ukrainian Jewish friends and celebrities who came to the U.S. during the same late 1980s wave speak emotionally of their Ukrainian pride.
But Ukraine is a different place than it once was. Shocking incidents of antisemitism, including some of the deadliest pogroms in Europe, were commonplace during the the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis in the massacre of the Jewish population, including at Babi Yar, outside of Kyiv, which was “one of the largest mass killings at a single location during World War II,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And while a portion of the people still hold antisemitic views, the country has undergone a Jewish cultural resurgence and now ranks, according to some surveys, as having the most favorable opinion of Jews among peer countries in the region. (Other surveys paint a decidedly less rosy picture.) Still, Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly chose a Jewish president, someone who said he came from a nonreligious “ordinary Soviet Jewish family,” a family much like mine. I feel like many can’t imagine a Russian electorate doing the same.
Ukraine was always a different place, in a way. Ukrainian Jews often speak about cities like Odessa, a storied seaport with a centuries-long Jewish history, and a population that was nearly 34% Jewish on the eve of World War II, with warmth and nostalgia. The city birthed countless Jewish legends, served as a breeding ground for the arts, and inspired many songs and tributes. I know few Jewish emigres who speak of Moscow this way. Because of their location within the Pale, Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Lviv also have extensive and illustrious Jewish histories (existing in tandem alongside the aforementioned atrocities). I’d argue that Ukrainian Jews were — and still are — much more rooted to a sense of place than Russian Jews, because of an enduring Jewish presence in that country. Why can’t they then be Ukrainians too? A distinction long denied to them. And so, those newly unfurled Ukrainian flags make sense. It’s an example of how a country isn’t necessarily stuck in stasis. How one can celebrate a place anew, if it’s willing to celebrate you.